APPLEWEED

[rayheinrich]

Ray
I started recording  back in 1984, when I got my first multitrack: a Teac  Portastudio.  This was a 4 track cassette unit and while it was nothing great, it suddenly gave me the ability to record my songs, then over dub vocal harmonies and add a keyboard track and ....wonder of wonders..... introduced me to bouncing tracks, a new concept to me whereby the first 3 tracks could be mixed down and bounced onto the available 4th track,  then two of the remaining 3 tracks mixed down and bounced onto the 3rd track, etc etc.... allowing in essence many more than 4 layers of sound on a 4 track tape. As i listen to those recordings today, i find those were terribly noisy recordings.... lots of tape hiss and background noise , birds chirping at the window, the occasional  car horn... but I hear a younger me in those. I transferred most of those recordings to digital around 2005 or so. Just as those cassette tapes were dying out from over play in my car cassette player.... and cd ' s were becoming the recording medium of choice. In 2008 I got my first digital 12-track digital recorder a Boss BR-1200-CD which gave me the ability to record many of my songs a little better... no take hiss....and all the recordings on my Soundcloud page have been home recordings using this device. Albeit with the same Audiotechnica  mic I've had since 1984.... an AT 818 II.  This time round I took care to minimize background noise too and decided to stick with a more minimalistic sound. Just me and a guitar for the greater part of the recordings.

Thanks again for listening ... and for your kind words.
Psyve

I love it when people got the Model#s.  That Boss must have cost a bunch back then.
My 'short' (about 15 inches) shotgun mic is an AT835A. Got it back in? 1995? Once you get a mic
you love you keep it. Wonderful mic for noisy (or any for that matter) environments. Get it 3 inches
from someone's mouth and the rest of the world does not exist. Of course you need to record some
ambient background and mix it back in. Perfect control.  Never got into multitrack as what I did
didn't need it. Well... I could have used it for discussion panels. Screw mixers, just use one track
per person and edit out the idiots that grab their mics, hum, tap on the table etc.